Operation Maths Assessment Records (infants to second class) on Excel

At Operation Maths we are constantly looking for ways to improve the usability of our programme, and to make it even more teacher-friendly. The most recent additions included long term plans for various combinations of multi-classes as well as excel versions of our Assessment Records. Following on from feedback from teachers, these include all the assessments for the entire school year, as well as incorporating extra features designed to make them even more teacher-friendly.

While there are already word versions of these assessment records available to download from Edco Learning, as well as the hard copy photocopiables in the Teacher’s Resource Books (TRBs), these excel versions provide teachers with a more efficient and flexible way to both record and analyse the results from the Assessment Booklets:

• Quickly get a total attainment score for each child (Assessment of Learning)
• Use these attainment scores to compare the attainment of various individuals and/or groups of children and identify children in need of further support (Assessment for Learning).
• Quickly get a score for each learning outcome, use these scores to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the class as a whole, while also being able to identify which learning outcome(s) require further consolidation (Assessment for Learning).

And this is all achievable in a very teacher-friendly way:

• Each of the five assessments ( eg End of October, End of December etc ) has a dedicated page; click the tab at the bottom to move between them.
• Teachers need only enter the children’s names once only on the first page; the inbuilt formulas then copy these names to the other pages in the document.
• Under each child’s name, the teacher can enter a score for each question (or page in junior infants); see more below for a suggested scoring system.
• The score for each individual question (or page) will be automatically totalled (horizontally across bottom) to give an attainment score for each child.
• When all the scores have been entered for each child, these will also be totalled along the right-hand side vertically to give a total for each learning outcome.
• After the five assessment tabs, there is a tab entitled “All”. Here all the scores from each assessment will be automatically replicated, once entered on the original assessment tab. This allows the teacher to easily view all the data in one screen. The scores for each child will also be totalled here to give you an overall score.
• Other useful information provided includes the specific strand and strand unit (S.SU) to which the learning outcome relates. These are abbreviated and a full explanation of the abbreviation is given on the last tab.

Suggested Scoring System

While teachers can devise and use any system which they prefer, one option would be to try the following:

• 4 = Question answered fully and correctly
• 3 = Question answered fully but without full accuracy ie almost all correct
• 2 = Has a majority of correct responses but a number of errors also
• 1 = Some correct responses but a majority of errors
• 0 = Not attempted or incorrect responses

Obviously, teachers will have to apply any scoring system in a flexible way; for example if there is a question that requires just one response and is therefore is either correct or incorrect, then only 0 or 4 will be awarded.

Once the appropriate score has been entered for each question then the teacher will have:

• a total attainment score for each child; the higher the score the more learning outcomes achieved.
• the means to sort and/or compare the attainment of various individuals and/or groups of children using these total attainment scores and identify those children with the lowest scores as needing further support.
• the means to to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the class as a whole by sorting/comparing the total scores for the learning outcomes, while also being able to identify which learning outcome(s) would benefit from further teaching.

Downloading and using

The excel documents for each class level are available to download by clicking on the links below:

Operation Maths Jnr Infants Assessment Record BETA

Operation Maths Snr Infants Assessment Record BETA

Operation Maths 1 Assessment Record BETA

Operation Maths 2 Assessment Record BETA

You may notice that these are still BETA versions only. This is because we would welcome more feedback on the usability of these documents.

Feedback can be left on this Edco Primary Maths facebook post or messaged to Edco Primary Maths.

Some questions you might consider answering:

• Did you find the excel document(s) useful?
• Did you find the scoring system useful?
• What suggestions would you make to improve them?

Operation Maths – Improving standardised test scores?

Two days after the maths standardised tests were done in our school, a teacher on my staff came to me to let me know that 18 children in her room had gone up by a STen of 1 or more, a fact she was attributing to Operation Maths, which was being used throughout the school for the first time, since the previous September.

This information made me curious to see were there similar results in other class levels; below is a summary table of my findings:

Average Percentile for each class level, current and previous years in Drumcondra Primary Mathematics Test – Revised (DPMT-R):

These results only include the classes that had a previous DPMT-R to which a comparison could be made. Also, they are the average of all the children’s results that completed the tests in each year, therefore other variables like children of different ability joining or leaving the school hasn’t been accounted for. However, they do make for interesting reading, while also raising interesting questions:

• 2nd, 3rd and 4th have made significant jumps, (3rd class in particular); could this be accredited to the Operation Maths programme (there were no other new initiatives this past year due to the freeze on the SIP for numeracy as directed by our union)?
• 5th and 6th classes stayed the same; why wasn’t the programme as effective for these classes? In the case of this school, perhaps the scores being already quite high in those classes meant there was little room for improvement. Or perhaps, because Operation Maths is a radically different programme, one that requires an openness to change the way we think about maths, it has more impact on younger classes where the children are more malleable and less rigid in their way of thinking than some of the older students. If this is the case, could we then expect to see improved results also for 5th and 6th class students in the future when they have been using the programme from 2nd and 3rd class?

Of course, this is only a small insight into one school’s experiences, and to have more conclusive results, data would need to be collected from a wider range of schools and this data would need to be monitored over time to see if these results were maintained. However, it does raise some interesting questions, and does indeed appear to indicate tentative evidence that Operation Maths can have a positive impact on the standardised test scores of all the children in a class. That said, improving test scores was never the main goal of Operation Maths, rather the aim is for the children to understand maths, not just do maths.  And if standardised test scores increase simultaneously, then that indeed is a positive bonus!

Did you use Operation Maths for the first time this year? Have you seen any similar trends with classes in your school? Please share with us!

Post script: Some may also suggest that Operation Maths has question items that better prepare the children for those in the test (i.e. teaching to the test). Having deliberately tried to be as unfamiliar as possible with the  DPMT-R test when authoring Operation Maths, means I can’t comment either way as I just don’t know if the question items resemble test items. Personally, I have no experience of the SigmaT at all, and at the time of authoring Operation Maths,  the only DPMT-R that I had administered in the previous 6-8 years was the DPMT-R for 5th class.